Designing is one of the most important steps in the manufacture of a wearable item, such as a piece of apparel. In a conventional linear process, the designing step is generally performed by the manufacturer of the apparel, in particular by its designer. That is, a designer initially develops a set of detailed designs including at least one pattern for the piece of apparel. Based thereon, instructions adapted for the manufacture of a number of predefined sizes of the piece of apparel are generated by persons by adapting the design to each size. However, the conventional design process is restricted to the ideas and creations of the designers and a limited set of sizes. In other words, it is quite inflexible. Moreover, changing the initial design by a person different from the designer is virtually impossible.
In the digital age, however, one option to improve the design process is to use the shape of the body of an individual wearing the piece of apparel. For example, applicant disclosed in EP 2 775 456 a method for determining the body shape of a dressed person and a display which displays an avatar with at least one item of clothing. Another method known from US 2005/0049741 A1 relates to making a pressure garment based on a 3D shape and pressure profile characteristics of a garment.
A disadvantage of these approaches in the designing process is that only a digital representation of the garments is provided and that the design cannot be further modified.
The t-shirt design machine “Mirror Mirror” of the Korean company MYDESIGNLAB (available at https://vimeo.com/164654370) allows a user to virtually design a t-shirt by using two remote controllers. Moreover, the user may draw samples with the two remote controllers or may select predefined samples.
However, this a t-shirt design machine is still too complex to operate for an ordinary user as usually at least one remote controller is needed. It is also merely a projection on the user of the image of the design that the user would see on a screen, and therefore, does not provide for a high degree of interaction since the user still has to use remote controls to choose a design. The hands are used as in many other human-computer interfaces to select the design of the shirt, thereby providing a low interactivity for designing the t-shirt.
Further, all of these known tools propose to modify a design of a piece of apparel in a post-production process, such as with pens or screen printing machines, which provide a poor quality product.
Based on the problems described above, there is a need to at least reduce the disadvantages described here. Further, there is also a need to provide an apparatus for designing a wearable item, which operates in a simple and intuitive manner.